Latin American criminal justice: From cage to enlightenment

Bullet holes and blood stain a wall above papers marking where bodies were found in an unfinished warehouse that was the site of a shootout between Mexican soldiers and alleged criminals on the outskirts of the village of San Pedro Limon, Mexico. Crime in Latin America is endemic, but some countries are experimenting with new methods that are improving the situation. (AP )

Latin America is the world’s most violent region. More than one million people died as a result of criminal violence in the past decade, according to the UN Development Program. In Honduras, the most murderous country on Earth, the homicide rate in 2012 was 90.4 people for every 100,000 inhabitants — an epidemic of killing that translates to 7,500 murders a year in a city the size of London (where the actual number in the year to May was 112).

Lethal crime is only part of the story. Robberies have nearly tripled over the past 25 years, in contrast to trends elsewhere. Although there are huge differences between (and within) countries in Latin America, the costs of crime are large everywhere. Some of these costs, like spending on security and health care, can be quantified. Others are more intangible. In Chile, one of the region’s safest countries, almost a third of inhabitants say their neighborhoods are affected by gangs.

Some of the causes of Latin America’s crime disease are deeply rooted: a demographic bulge of young men, for one, and stubbornly high levels of income inequality. Others emanate from outside the region: the demand for drugs flowing into the United States, and the supply of guns flowing out of it. But there is another, more tractable culprit — the region’s criminal-justice system. Villains often act with impunity. The global conviction rate for homicide is 43 for every 100 murders; in Latin America it is 24. Petty criminals clog the jails, forming a talent cesspool from which hardened gangs recruit.

Examples abound of corrupt police, bureaucratic courts and infernal prisons; success stories are rarer but provide valuable lessons. The first of these is to turn away from the policies of mano dura, the iron-fisted approach to criminal justice that overwhelms the region’s prisons and judicial systems, toward principles of prevention and rehabilitation. Nicaragua’s highly regarded police force offers counseling to wayward teenagers: Its murder rate is one of the lowest in Latin America. Colombia’s police force, which over the years has become much better at fighting organized crime, has adopted a system of community-based policing to deal with day-to-day criminality. More than half of the Dominican Republic’s prisons have a Scandinavian-style focus on education and training: recidivism rates have tumbled.

A second lesson is the importance of political commitment. Mano dura policies may be counterproductive but they are popular: It takes political guts to adopt a “softer” approach to crime. A better criminal-justice system also takes money and sustained effort. Peru’s low-paid police are allowed to double as private security guards under a pernicious scheme in which they have a day on and then a day off; it would be better to pay more for a full-time force that doesn’t regard public service as an interlude in between making money. Coordination is critical. Efforts to drive gang leaders out of specific favelas in Rio de Janeiro have reduced crime there, but critics allege the bad guys have simply moved to other parts of the city.

The third element of success is institutional: a framework that allows the criminal-justice system to operate independently while still being held accountable for its actions. Too often politicians interfere; the removal of Claudia Paz y Paz, a fearless attorney-general in Guatemala, is a recent example. Too rarely are errant police, prosecutors and courts held to account by external overseers. In only three countries does more than half the population express some or lots of confidence in their justice systems. Latin America’s crime problem cannot be solved if the rule of law does not hold for everyone.